It has decentralization today, but also no users today.
I would be happy with it but my contact list quite empty.
I'm not outright rejecting XMPP. I would like it very much to just use XMPP, but something needs to happen. It needs to be easy to use, friction-less, have all the fancy features and probably more to sell than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Matrix at the same time, which is no small feat.
Core XMPP does not cut it. People expect more from a chat solution and won't adopt it as-is.
XMPP has had decentralization for a very long time, but almost no users (if speaking about actual, decentralized, chat; it's used in many other things). It had both decentralization and users for a short time with Google chat, and user with no decentralization with Google chat and Facebook chat for a longer time, but both things are dead now.
The network effect is the biggest issue to overcome for a chat system, not the actual tech, and XMPP has not solved it. Unfortunately, if you ask me.
Element/Matrix, in contrast, have the features and a beginning of adoption. it now needs polish, smoothing the rough edges, and adoption. And also adoption. And even more adoption. Including from people/entities providing homeservers. I tried to make people adopt it. I failed. Signal, however, has been a success so far. Element/Matrix is great and a success in my company, however.
I can't claim it has exact feature parity with Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, but it has all the important stuff and is good enough for my family to use daily. It also has some advantages, such as not requiring a phone number (which e.g. means that my children can use it on the old "living room tablet").
Snikket counters the "empty contact list" problem and the network effects by focusing on small groups like this, automatically including everyone else in the same group(s) in your contact list. It helps a lot.
The ultimate goal is that we get enough such small groups operating on open networks, eventually the members of those groups will find they can communicate with each other. It's better approach than isolated individuals using XMPP/whatever with empty contact lists just because they believe in it.
Okay, this actually looks like a serious attempt at solving the exact problems I pointed out! I wish you all the best for Snikket! Congratulations and thanks for working on this issue that definitely needs a solution.
Thanks! The project is generally going well, if a little ambitious for the resources it currently has :)
Having been down the venture capital route in the past and not particularly enjoyed it, I'm trying to work on Snikket as close to full-time as possible while self-limiting to funding that's compatible with the open nature of the project and the ecosystem it's a part of. Currently grants, sponsorships and donations are helping immensely with that.
There is no desktop app yet, but it's firmly on the roadmap. For now I tend to point people towards Dino or Gajim for Windows and Linux, or Beagle for MacOS. None are a perfect match for the project right now, but power users can generally deal with it, and all of them are under active development and constantly improving.
XMPP is just the internet standard, it does not try to solve the network effect problem. But it would be important if platforms like Signal, Telegram or Matrix would adopt it instead of inventing their own incompatible protocols.
Without a internet standard for IM we cannot hope for advanced features like usable federation, encrypted messaging or A/V calls between platforms. We probably should not be promoting platforms which are not standards compliant.
I would be happy with it but my contact list quite empty.
I'm not outright rejecting XMPP. I would like it very much to just use XMPP, but something needs to happen. It needs to be easy to use, friction-less, have all the fancy features and probably more to sell than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Matrix at the same time, which is no small feat.
Core XMPP does not cut it. People expect more from a chat solution and won't adopt it as-is.
XMPP has had decentralization for a very long time, but almost no users (if speaking about actual, decentralized, chat; it's used in many other things). It had both decentralization and users for a short time with Google chat, and user with no decentralization with Google chat and Facebook chat for a longer time, but both things are dead now.
The network effect is the biggest issue to overcome for a chat system, not the actual tech, and XMPP has not solved it. Unfortunately, if you ask me.
Element/Matrix, in contrast, have the features and a beginning of adoption. it now needs polish, smoothing the rough edges, and adoption. And also adoption. And even more adoption. Including from people/entities providing homeservers. I tried to make people adopt it. I failed. Signal, however, has been a success so far. Element/Matrix is great and a success in my company, however.